Event overview
Art of Projection Day 1: The Magic Carpet
A unique opportunity to experience the magic lantern in action!
No medium transported more people through time and space in the 19th century than the magic lantern, cinema’s ancestor, and for 250 years the world’s premier screen experience.
Lantern impresarios “Professor” Joss Marsh and Mr. David “Limelight” Francis, of the new Kent Museum of the Moving Image, present a panorama of the Imperial itineraries, virtual travels, fantastical geographies, and metaphysical journeys of the Victorian era using an original lantern, authentic texts, and a wide variety of rare glass slides—engraved, hand-painted, photographic, and mechanical.
See Vesuvius by limelight! See the Great Pyramid by lantern! Gibraltar by day! Paris by night! The world in a lens! Conquer space! Abolish time! Catalogue YOUR Empire! Traverse Britannia’s seas, without danger of sickness! Take the “all-red route around the world”! Make the “Grand Tour“ for sixpence! Walk the streets the Saviour trod! Fly the lantern’s magic carpet to Brobdingnag and Lilliput! Surrender yourself to the locomotive of destiny: the unstoppable, world-changing, railway train!
Slides will include: a “pleasant delusory journey“ (as Victorians called it) sea; Imperial visual archives of modern and ancient Egypt; fanciful sketches of modes of transport; Gulliver’s Travels; and the religious railway extravaganza, with original songs, Signal Lights.
David Francis O.B.E. was for 15 years Curator of the British National Film Archive, and subsequently Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress. His publications include the ground-breaking Chaplin: Genesis of a Clown (co-authored, 1977), and Museums, Curatorship and the Moving Image Experience (co-authored, 2008). With Joss Marsh, he is plotting a book on the “Dickensian” late-Victorian multi-media celebrity, George R. Sims.
Until 2013, Joss Marsh was Associate Professor of Victorian Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in 19th-Century England (1998), the forthcoming Starring Charles Dickens, and numerous essays on Dickens, Chaplin, the 19th-century novel and film, Victorian visual culture, celebrity, film stardom, and the magic lantern. She occasionally submits to stage and radio discipline, most recently as Widow Corney in Oliver!, and she is probably the only female academic in the world to have played Scrooge, in drag, in a professional theatre.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Mar 2014 | 5:30pm - 7:30pm |
Accessibility
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